Chess Openings - Queen's Indian Defence

Welcome to ChessOpenings.com. Today we're going to take a look at a solid defense to the Queen's pawn opening known as the Queen's Indian defense. In this opening, Black's key idea is to restrain White in the center, and to develop his pieces quickly and only later launch a counter attack against White center. Let's take a look. The Queen's Indian is a response to the Queen's pawn opening so, Queen's Indian games tend to start with the move pawn to d4. And now, to aim for a Queen's Indian, Black plays Knight to f6, and after White's most common play c4, Black plays the move pawn to e6. This up which Black is using is extremely solid here. The goal is to answer White's play Knight to c3 with this pen Bishop to d4 and this would be called the Nimzo-Indian. By penning the Knight on c3, Black gains a grip on this e4 square which is a critical square since it makes it difficult for White to complete his expansion in the center with pawn to e4. At the same time, Black remains flexible with his central pawn so he can always choose between d5 or c5 in these positions depending on which setup White chooses. The Nimzo-Indian has such a great reputation that many players prefer to avoid it with the move Knight to f3, which is actually the slight favorite for White in this position. And now, Black can play the Queen's Indian with pawn to b6 and this is the starting position of the Queen's Indian. The Nimzo-Indian and Queen's Indian are sister openings that were made popular by ideas of Aron Nimzowitsch. One of the famous chess thinkers of the 20th-Century. Nimzowitsch proposed that it's possible to play without occupying the center immediately with pawns, but instead to attack it with pieces from a distance and here, Black's going to be using his pieces in order to restrain White's options. Restraint was also another concept which Nimzowitsch was very fond of. He thought that positional play largely boiled down to taking away options from the opponent. And one of Black's key ideas in the Queen's Indian is to make it more difficult for White to advance his center and only later to attack it. In the Queen's Indian, Black is going to aim his light square Bishop and his Knight at this point on e4 and this is in order both to restrain the moves onto e4 and also there's this cramping move d4 to d5 which Black is also looking out to prevent. If White plays Knight to c3 at any moment, Black will still often use this pen Bishop before in order to further strengthen his grip over the light squares. Now, in this position, White's most popular move is pawn to g3 and this known as the Classical Variation in which White aims to simply complete his development on the King's side in a logical fashion and develop a counter weight across the long diagonal. Essentially, White contents himself for the time being with this more modest pawn duo on d4 and c4 and just focuses for now on completing development. Now traditionally, Black simply plays Bishop to b7 and after these standards move Bishop g2, Bishop g7, castles, castles, and Knights e3, we reach an interesting key position and I really want to devote some time to getting acquainted with some of the rich strategic content of this position. Now if you were asked what would be the most logical move in this position, you could very easily make the mistake of suggesting the move pawn to d5. This is not a very good move for a couple of reasons. First of all it's against the spirit of the opening which says that Black should be waiting until the most opportune moment to make this kind of occupation moves in the center, these moves which occupy the center with a pawn. He needs to restrain himself from making moves like these until the timing is just right. This is the first thing but secondly in the Queen's Indian, there's a very common concept which arises which is that after the taking, capture, or exchange of pawns on d5, Black finds himself with two unique problems here in the Queen's Indian which is that the Bishop on b7 is now hemmed in and secondly, the C pawn is on an open file and becomes vulnerable to attack very easily. For example, White often continues Bishop f4 in this position so that's a logical square for the Bishop and it already starts to put an eye on this vulnerable pawn on c7. Sooner or later, Black will want to play c5 in order to free his position and move his pawn to a less vulnerable location. Let's imagine Black does this now as he sometimes has. This does not really solve his problems since after the moves D takes c5 now or later which leaves Black in what's called a "hanging pawns" formation. The D and C pawns are both extremely vulnerable to direct attack. If the pawns were able to just simply roll down the board they could be an asset so the "hanging pawns" formation isn't always bad, but, if White can generate quickly an attack on these pawns it's very possible that Black could end up losing material. It turns out that in this position, for example, we can show some methods which White could use to gain some big advantage against these pawns. Knights to e5, a great move here, this would unveil a third attacker on the d5 pawn and it simultaneously pins the pawn so the pawn cannot advance so this is a great move here this Knight to e5. Of course at the moment White only has three attackers and Black has three defenders so White still needs more firepower. Black say, continues with this move Knight e6, and now White has a wonderful maneuver here Knight to c4 taking advantage of this bin in trying to bring this Knight to some square where it would be useful in attacking this pawn perhaps Knight e3, for example, putting up the final pressure on this pawn. If its White to move in this position and he was able to play Knight e3, we would already have serious issue for Black in defending this pawn, perhaps it's not even possible. So, Black instead has often played this move for example, Queen to d7. And now White found this move Knight to a5, still finding a way to include the Knight into the attack just to show with this move Queen d7 the idea is that if Knight e3, well I'm always ready to bring one of the rooks to d8 and bring this next defender to this square and at the same time, in fact even more importantly, I'm just ready to play d4. Look at that, the Bishop is defended. So in fact, this move Knight a5, it increases the pressure on b7, prevents the pawn from moving, and also threatens to capture the Bishop and gain the pawn. Of course, White has a big initiative here. Of course you don't always get such a beautiful attack like this against an any pawn formations but it's surprising how frequently the pawns can come under attack in positions just like these. Rolling back to the position after Knight to c3 we just showed with this little digression that this move pawn to d5 is not a very good idea for Black, in fact, it typically is not a good idea in the Queen's Indian for a couple of the reasons we just showed. So how does Black continue his development here and solidify his grip over the light squares. It turns out he has the outstanding move Knight e4. With this move he just directly occupies the e4 square making it impossible for White to play e4 and most importantly, he has a second idea in mind which is to use the F pawn to strengthen his hold over the e4 square. In this way he will not be blocking the diagonal of his Bishop. There are a lot of ways this position can go but they are all super solid for Black. For example, since White will want to avoid double pawns on c3, the most direct is Knight takes e4, Bishop takes e4. And now in order to gain the chance for e2 to e4, White typically plays Knight e1, just trying to get rid of these Bishops. After the trade, Bishop takes g2, Knight takes g2, and Black finally says, "Well, I'm willing to play D-5 now, why not? I don't have this Bishop sitting on b7." For Black we can say that his strategy has mostly been successful. The exchange of two pairs of pieces and the ability to now gain a reasonable share of the center makes this position just about equal. So, after this move Knight to e4, White really needs to out on his thinking cap to figure out how he can set Black some new problems here. One way which has been found to do this is this move Queen to c2 and this sets a little trap for Black which is that f5 looks like the natural response here which is exactly what we said is the goal and we are solidifying control of this square. However, the properties of the Queen and the Bishop allow that White is now able to simply play this excellent move Knight e5. This is because if Black tried pawn to d6 in this position, he would quickly find himself in trouble after the move Knight take e4 and pawn takes Knight, and now simply, Bishop takes pawn. Because of the pressure down this diagonal, Black will never actually have time to capture the Knight. The net affect of all this is that after this move Knight to e5, White simply has few attackers on this point on e4 and it's going to be very difficult for Black to arrange an appropriate defense of the Knight. He needs to avoid this direct move pawn to f5 and instead he captures on c3, Queen takes c3, and now plays pawn to f5. But, White still has in mind one last little factor which he's going to try to use in order to gain an advantage in this position. In addition to still playing for the move pawn to e4, he's also going to count on the fact that eventually the e6 might turn out to be weak if Black plays d6 eventually as he most likely will. So for example, the main line runs pawn to b3, Bishop f6, Bishop b2, pawn d6, very natural. What Black would like to do in such a position is play Knight d7 and then either e5 or c5. However, as we pointed out there is a weakness left behind on e6 so we have this move rook A d1, Queen e7, and now White just picks up with this aim of Knight e1 playing for e2 to e4 at some point trading off this Bishop. And now after Bishop takes g2, Knight takes g2, Knight d7, and Queen c2 preparing the move e2 to e4, White is looking forward to some kind of small initiative based on the weakness of the e6 pawn. So you can see that even this far into the game there is still a battle raging in which White is doggedly trying to pursue this aim of achieving e2 to e4 while Black tries to avoid it or at least trade off a couple pairs of pieces and pawns in order to neutralize the affects of this move. We see that this fight for e4 is the major theme which is holding the entire Queen's Indian together. I hope this video has given you insight into some of the key concepts of the Queen's Indian and insight into some of the key variations. I highly recommend this opening for players of both colors as the strategic content of this opening is very rich and it's very solid for both sides. Until next time.